Braden King's Here stars Ben Foster as Will, an American satellite cartographer on a contract assignment in Armenia, where he meets Gadarine (Lubna Azabal), who is visiting family in her home country after making a name for herself as an artist abroad. She is stubbornly independent, her professional and personal self-sufficiency expressed through a habitual globetrotting that serves as a small-scale political rebellion against her old-fashioned, peasant-class family. Comparatively restrained and watchful, Will is equally focused on transience. Drawn to one another after two chance meetings ("Big world, small country," she says), Gadarine impulsively joins Will on a trip to gather ground data to make a more accurate Google-style map.

The couple's excursions into Armenia's sparsely-populated regions give
King an excuse to indulge in spectacular widescreen cinematography. In
both city and pastoral landscape, the signature shot here is a
scene-ending, slow 90+ degree pan to the left. The counter-intuitive
direction of the camera movement implies a last look back, cataloguing
the moment and processing it into memory.

Here is a romance in the boy-girl sense--and a wonderfully alive
one--but it's also an exploration of the romantic worldview of the
traveller/explorer, updated for a time in which we can zoom in and out
of places almost as easily as we zoom in and out of satellite maps. The
romantic notion of travel--in which the road is a catalyst for
transformational, transitional experience--is black swanned by the
specter of the colonialist conqueror. The briefly-stated elephant
between Will and Gadarine is that he is being paid by a corporation in
his country for geographic information about her country, which she
(probably rightly) suspects they want because there's money to be made
from exploiting it. If he does his job well, the places that bred their
affair will change or disappear. This running subtext intensifies the
urgency of scenes that might otherwise seem mundane. While Will surveys,
Gadarine takes countless Polaroids of their surroundings--her effort to
preserve the moment as he's ensuring change for the future. When she
introduces him to a hidden cove, Gadarine asks only that he "leave it
off the map."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Here is itself working off the map, at least in terms of the traditional Sundance dramatic competition film. Foster and Azabal (who King cast first, based on
her performance in Paradise Now) have incredible physical chemistry,
which allows the love story of Here to grease a path for its more
complicated formal elements. King weaves into his travelogue dreamy,
extra-narrative montages of optically printed abstractions, set to a
narration by Foster that could best be described as imagistic poetry.